Dusk
by panzerkatzen
Summary: A complete rewrite of RWBY. Long ago, hunters and fauns worked together to free Remnant from the darkness, but centuries of war, greed and discord have caused them to fight amongst themselves, even as the darkness returns. Four young huntresses find themselves caught in the crossfire and must choose to fight the darkness, or become of it.


**RWBY – Dusk**

* * *

A quick intro first.

RWBY is a series that I both like and hate. I like the setting, but not the way it was presented, I like the characters but not how they were written, I like JNPR and think that they should be the protagonists and not RWBY, and I like the world but not the glimpses we are given. My personal opinion is that whoever designed the main four are weeaboos, and that the writers are catering to them. Feel free to comment on this, but an opinion is an opinion.

Dusk is the first of a series, in which I reimagine RWBY to be the piece of art that I think it should have been. Names will be changed, identities and backstories altered, and the world will be shaken thoroughly enough so that the pieces that aren't anchored down properly will go to places that they'd fit better in. I'll start with the trailers, then move on to season 1 proper, and maybe season 2 if I hate it enough.

If you're the type of reader that likes moderately dark, edgy things, then I welcome you to Dusk.

- panzerkatzen

* * *

**Prologue I – Blood is Red Like Roses**

* * *

The snow crunched loudly with each step she took. The wind whistled and howled, and would be silent for a time, as if it had run out of things to say, but would return in a fury. The young lady's cloak flapped and rustled around her, a stark red among the blacks, grays and whites of the forest.

With each breath she took, she expelled a small puff of vapor. It was cold, and the snow was new, but this wasn't unfamiliar for her. Ruby traveled a lot, never quite settling down in one place long enough to take root. She had been in snowstorms far colder and harsher than this, but she hadn't been alone then. There had been others to protect her.

Not so now. As she walked, she could feel the weight of her weapon on her back and shoulders as it bounced lightly with each step and with each crunch of the snow underneath her feet. In the last few years it had been her only constant companion. Despite this she was not quite alone, and she knew that there were others in the forest, others that were not entirely human.

The snowfall had stopped more than an hour ago. Ruby set her hand to a tree, throwing her hood back to look into the distance. Her destination was only a little further now. She continued to make her way through the trees, being careful not to trip on any roots.

She could sense them. There were several of them, about three or four or so, but there could have been more deeper in the forest. They traveled in packs, hunting at night. They had been more active recently, and she had stumbled on a few corpses on her way, not all of them belonging to wild animals. She had been able to sense them when she was younger. It was a gift, her grandmother had told her, from her parents. It had only grown stronger as she had grown older, and the beasts too seemed to grow in number with each passing day.

The crunching snow softened, as the trees receded. Ruby could feel the ground hardening under her feet, the compacted dirt slowly turning into a mix of denser stone and clay. She was close.

She reached the edge of the forest, where the trees gave way to brush, then stopped altogether. Beyond the trees was a cliff, and just before the cliff sat a cottage – or what was left of it. It had been abandoned years ago, and the hard winter's wind hand punched several holes in the thatched roof. The few glass windows were broken, but they didn't look like they had been broken by human hands, nor those of beasts. The door was open, clattering in the wind.

Ruby's expression darkened. Her grandfather wouldn't have been so careless to have left the door open. She looked around in search of tracks, but found none in the snow. The beasts were closer now. She quickened her pace and ran to the cottage, shutting the door behind her.

The cottage wasn't entirely old. Some parts of it had been repaired and remodeled, but the damage still showed. There was a patch of rotten wood on the ceiling from where the snow had gotten into the second floor and melted. Dust (regular old dust.) , dirt and snow were everywhere, in the small foyer and in the hallway. The doors to the living room and the room that had served as her parents' were closed. She checked both of them, and it seemed that they had been locked tightly. She experimentally flipped the switch to the hallway lights, and found that the reserve power cells that her grandfather had installed were still working.

Ruby headed to the kitchen. The doors of the cabinets were all ajar, and several cans of soup and beans were lying sideways on the floor. What had been a loaf of bread sat mouldy and flourishing in the breadbox. She checked the refrigerator and found nothing of importance. Rummaging through several cabinets she found some packs of crackers with a thin layer of dust on them. She patted the dust off of them and gobbled them up hungrily. The kitchen window faced the forest; Ruby took a peek and saw shadows between the trees. They were waiting, but hesitant.

Ruby left the kitchen, scooping up a few cans of food and dropping them into a small satchel slung under her cloak. She raced up the stairs two at a time to her room, finding the door closed but unlocked. Her room seemed untouched since the day she'd left it long ago. She dove onto the floor and reached under her bed to find several old books, but nothing like she was looking for. She took a look at one of the walls, where she'd pinned up a map of the continent, with parts of it colored in where the beasts were the most populous. Dust coated the map like it coated everything else in the house. She absentmindedly touched the map with a finger, tracing lines where the new safe zones were. They were much smaller now.

She returned to the hallway and found her grandparents' room unlocked. This room had seen signs of people recently – although how recently was up for question, since everything seemed like it had been untouched for a while. There was a bookcase but the books were in disarray and many of them were on the floor and bed, scattered. There was paper everywhere, and she saw more paper than floor. Ruby got on her knees and looked at some of the papers. They were mostly old weapon schematics. She checked what she knew should have been the newer additions, and found them missing.

She looked out the window. This one only offered a partial view of the forest, but there was a shadow or two in sight, their outlines clearer. The beasts took forms of wolves in this forest, as long as horses, and just as fast. The snow had started falling again.

Ruby removed her weapon's safety, but kept it slung behind her.

She ran out of the room and back downstairs, to the door of her parents' room. She kicked it, and the door broke down after the third try.

Shelving lined the walls, looking more modern than anything in her house. A large cot was in the center of the room, moth-eaten. There was a desk with drawers at the other end of the room and Ruby darted to it, opening each drawer and checking the contents. She found things that she couldn't immediately make sense of: old maps, news clippings, files with weapon schematics, files detailing Dust crystals-

A piece of paper fell out of one of the files. Ruby picked it up. It was a picture of a little girl with jet black hair and red eyes.

"Now here's a little girl that I haven't seen in a while." she smiled.

Ruby took some of the thicker files, slipping in the photo and wedging them into her satchel. She'd look over these later. There was one last thing to see.

Stepping over the debris of the door, Ruby headed back into the kitchen and through another pathway out the back door. Years ago this would have been a moderately fenced off yard – now it was a bare patch of snow-covered stone and mud, leading out to a small stone monument, mere feet from the edge of the cliff. Ruby sensed the beasts around her, not quite closing in, not yet. She walked slowly, her fingers lightly touching the handle of her weapon.

The stone monument, she had been told, was her grandmother's grave. The cottage had belonged to her grandmother's family, and had fallen into the possession of the Redds when she had married Ruby's grandfather. Ruby had spent some of her childhood years here, and she remembered being only as tall as her grandmother's knees, and remembered when her grandmother used to tell her stories of great hunters, felling the dark beasts and driving them to the edges of the world so very long ago.

Her grandmother had vanished one day. Ruby was told that she had died, though Ruby had not believed it. It was an incredible thing to try and believe. Even when the grave had been set in place, with her grandmother nowhere in sight, Ruby had simply decided that her grandmother suddenly dying was out of the question. She had spent the rest of that year at the cottage by the grave, running amongst the patches of red flowers and playing with figures of hunters she had crafted out of sticks and leaves. Her last day at the cottage, she had made a promise to the monument that she would become a hunter just like in the stories.

The grave was weathered and its surface smooth to the touch. Ruby knelt and wiped the snow off. Her grandmother's name had been etched here, but the years of rain, wind and snow had sanded it clean off. All that remained was one word: Redd.

In a swift motion, Ruby unlatched her weapon, giving it a good twirl to snap it to its full length until the parts clicked into place. She dug the bladed end of it into the ground and aimed the sight straight at the remaining word on the grave, and pulled the trigger.

The sound of the shot resounded around the clearing, followed by the clink of her weapon discharging the bullet's shell out of the chamber. Ruby could feel the beasts pause, cautious. She ignored them, and examined the broken stone. The thin stone surface had cracked from the magic-powered shot, and she lifted the lighter chunks of stone out of the way.

The casket's lid had been split and splintered by the shot, and was visibly devoid of any human remains. This much she had expected. Her grandmother was a veteran hunter, as all of the women that married and born into the Redd family had been. Redds died two ways – in battle, or of old age. The latter was more common. Whenever they wished, they vanished, and would only be found when they wanted to be, even by each other. What the casket contained however was even more surprising to Ruby than if she HAD found her grandmother dead. Ruby grabbed at the casket lid and swung it open, to find a lode of black Dust crystals.

The Redds' weapons used only colored crystals, and even then they stuck to primary. They never used the black or white ones, which were exceedingly powerful, with one exception: fighting other human beings.

"We're at war." Ruby murmured, the vapor from her breath clouding her vision.

The beasts had picked up the magic of the Dust crystals, and this agitated them. Within seconds, howls began to fill the air. Ruby reached into the casket and took as many of the black crystals she could, filling a pouch on her belt with them. She opened a slot on her weapon, which was empty, and set one of the crystals into it. She had never intended for this slot to be filled, but the lode was an unmistakable sign. She sensed the creatures nearing.

The snow fell around her, as the black forms of the wolf beasts sped towards her. Ruby readied her scythe, her cloak billowing in the wind. The last time she had seen this place, the field had been red with flowers.

It would be red again with blood. She would see to it.


End file.
